Will my honourable friend give way?
The formal courtesies of the House of Commons are derided by some, but they serve a deterrent purpose
For all that I am something of a traditionalist, I respect—and sometimes agree with—those who honestly want to change the House of Commons for the better. We cannot all agree all the time about how the elected chamber should run, and an ongoing dialogue about keeping it operating effectively is vital. As I have written previously, the House is not inherently opposed to change, and bodies like the Modernisation Committee and the Wright Committee have shown ways in which it can be improved.
But not all “reformers” are good actors. I won’t provoke a row by naming names or making insinuations, but from time to time politicians emerge, inside and outside the House, who want to upset the constitutional settlement or denigrate the Commons for their own reasons. They tend to choose some of the softer targets and tend towards ridicule rather than sincere reform.
(I shall anticipate others with my own caveat: yes, if elements of procedure or practice are vulnerable to ridicule, they should be examined especially carefully, because they might perhaps deserve it. But they do not always. One can take things out of context which, in their proper surroundings, make perfect sense: for example, when the door of the Commons is slammed in Black Rod’s face at the State Opening of Parliament and she has to knock for entry, it could be seen in isolation as an oddity, but in the context of the wider ceremony, it is an important reminder of the history of the elected chamber’s independence from the sovereign.)
One frequent target is the apparently arcane manner of address which the Commons requires. As most readers will know, MPs are required to address all remarks to the chair—almost always the Speaker or one of his deputies—and must refer to other Members in the third person. Moreover, their names should not be used, but they should be identified by constituency, for example, “the Member for Wokingham” or “the Member for Edinburgh South.” This requires a substantial feat of memory: not only must one in theory know the names of all one’s fellow MPs, but one must also remember the name of the seat they represent.
This is not all. All MPs are “honourable Members” (often the source of tedious, heavy-handed humour), but members of the Privy Council are “right honourable Members”. All cabinet ministers are—must be—privy counsellors but the accolade is also given to some junior ministers and some senior backbenchers; in addition, it is a position for life, so there will be retired ministers who are still “right honourable”. Those in one’s own party are “friends”, as in “my honourable friend, the Member for Buckingham”.
There are other ornamentations which are formally no longer to be used but still make occasional appearances. The Modernisation Committee recommended in 1998 that these should be abolished, but before that, commissioned officers in the armed forces were “honourable and gallant Members” and senior barristers (QCs/KCs) were “honourable and learned”. One even sometimes heard “honourable and reverend” (certainly Jeremy Hanley (Con, Richmond) once described Ian Paisley (DUP, Antrim North) in those terms, though he may have been in jest).
Only for connoisseurs were rarities like “the Noble Lord, the Member for…”, applied to Irish non-representative peers or heirs to peerages holding courtesy titles. That said, the most recent examples of such, Michael Ancram (Con, Devizes) and Richard Needham (Con, Chippenham), did not request the style; Ancram was Earl of Ancram, heir of the Marquess of Lothian, and in fact inherited the substantive title before he left the Commons; Needham was 6th Earl of Kilmorey, a title in the peerage of Ireland which did not carry membership of the House of Lords with it.
I digress. (It’s not uncommon.) This all may seem an impenetrable thicket of etiquette, impossible to remember and serving only to obfuscate. Two minor points against this: firstly, there are “get-outs” if memory fails, using formulations such as “the honourable Lady who spoke last” or “my honourable Friend below the gangway" [in the chamber]”. Equally, ministers and (less frequently) shadow ministers may be referred to by their positions. Secondly, like any matter of rote learning, it seems more daunting than it is. Frequent use in the natural flow of debate will make these accolades come as almost second nature.
Nevertheless, at first blush these elaborate styles seem unnecessary, and they are, I will admit, potentially confusing for a television audience—if a Conservative MP refers to “the right honourable Member for Islington North”, will viewers know that he means Jeremy Corbyn? Possibly not. It would be simpler, certainly, if actual names were used. One could continue to speak through the chair: “I must disagree with Mr Miliband” or “I support what Sir Keir is saying.”
In the sub-title of this piece, however, I deliberately used the term “deterrent”. For all the sturm und drang of Prime Minister’s Questions, the House of Commons is a relatively well-behaved chamber. There may be catcalling and insinuations “from a sedentary position” from time to time, but our MPs tend not to get physical, as they have done in Taiwan and Ukraine and India, to take only three examples. The last genuine fracas in the Commons was during a debate immediately after Bloody Sunday in 1972 when Bernadette Devlin, the independent republican MP for Mid-Ulster, was so enraged by the words of the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, that she crossed the chamber and slapped his face. (Edward Heath, with typically unempathetic mordancy, remarked “I remember that vividly because I thought that she was going to hit me.”)
Even solo physical exertions are unusual. In 2018, Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Lab, Brighton Kemptown) seized the mace, the symbol of the House’s authority, during a debate on the EU Withdrawal Agreement: he was swiftly suspended for the rest of the day’s sitting. Others have laid hands on the mace—a strict no-no, as only the Serjeant at Arms can handle it—John McDonnell (Lab, Hayes and Harlington) was suspended for five days in 2009 after picking it up and placing it on an empty bench; in 1988, Ron Brown (Lab, Edinburgh Leith) grabbed the mace during a debate on the community charge and threw it to the floor, damaging it; while, most famously, Michael Heseltine (Con, Henley) earned his reputation for impulsiveness and lack of judgement in 1976 when, in a chaotic and shambolic series of events, he took the mace from the table and ironically profferred it to the government front bench.
My suggestion is that the roundabout way of referring to other Members is one way—not the only way, by any means—of keeping tempers under control. It is a safety valve and a verbal straitjacket: after all, it is much easier to shout “You are a liar!” than it is to infuse with venom the phrase “Mr Speaker, the right honourable Member for [x] is a liar!” (Of course, MPs may not accuse each other of deceit: I shall return to this in another blog.) It may not seem much, but that enforced circumlocution does seem to lower temperatures somewhat.
This deterrent force, like the nuclear one which we debate so hotly, cannot be absolutely proved. But I have spent a lot of time in the chamber, and, quirky youth that I was, I have listened to and watched a lot more. White-hot anger is rare, and can be defused by a skilful chair. Slanging matches are rarer still, and physical violence is almost unknown. The speaker who loses control completely is a rara avis, and may suffer a more long-term collapse in authority. In the main, the Commons bubbles along at “hot but not boiling” even in its tensest moments.
I realise this not a cut-and-dried argument. Few aspects of Parliament ever are. I make no apology for having an instinctive bias towards courtesy and formality: as a parenthesis, of the various chairs I worked with over 11 years, some I called by first name and some remained “Chairman”, but I always began with the formal style and moved to the more familiar if invited. If the invitation did not come, that was fine, and I never minded. I took the view that it was a matter for them how they wished to be addressed.
It seems to me, though, that the potential harm in taking away this polite muzzle is rather greater than the advantages of its scrapping. It is a step which can only be taken once: with more straightforward modes of address, it would be impossible then to re-impose the courtesy of “my honourable friend”. And that irreversible nature is something we should always bear in mind when making changes to procedure and practice. Get it right, because you only have one chance.